Guest posting or guest blogging is a well-known technique in the SEO world to bring in traffic to a website. It also helps you get a high-quality backlink that enables your website to get faster indexing and better ranking in search engines. In short, guest posting plays a significant role in improving your website’s traffic, credibility and awareness.
To use this technique, one searches for websites and blogs where they can submit their article as a guest author with a link back to their own website or blog. It’s a way of writing content for other company’s sites to attract traffic back to your website and boost its domain authority.
Let’s find out how can you start guest posting in eight easy steps.
Table of Contents
1. Determine the Purpose of Your Guest Blogging
Before you start with the guest posting process, you must have pre-defined goals. It will help you speed up the process and target the right blogs to guest post on. Your reason for guest posting could be:
- Building links and authority
- Driving traffic to a specific web page on your site
- Accumulating contacts for growing your email list
2. Set the Criteria
Once you have decided on the purpose of writing a guest post, you should set criteria for picking a blog or website for guest posting. After all, you can’t pick any random blog to guest post on.
To gain maximum benefit out of guest blogging, it’s essential that you hand-pick high-quality yet relevant websites only. You can create a spreadsheet and make a list of sites you think are suitable as per your niche.
You can create this list based on the following metrics:
- Domain authority (DA): It’s a domain ranking system by Moz that ranks a website based on 1 to 100 scales. The average DA is between 40 to 50), while above 50 is considered great.
- Traffic: Look for websites that are publishing new content regularly and have high traffic.
- Niche: To make your guest posting effective, especially from an SEO point of view, you should look for similar niche guest blogging sites.
3. Search for Guest Blogging Opportunities
Now it’s time to find out websites and blogs that come under your set criteria and let you contribute as a guest author. Create a list of guest blogging sites where you think your potential audience may hang out.
You can use the following Google search parameters to make this process easier.
- Your keyword + “contributing writer”
- Your keyword + “guest post”
- Your keyword + “submit a guest post”
- Your keyword + “accept guest posts”
- Your keyword + “write for us”
- Your keyword + “this post was written by”
- Your keyword + “contributor guidelines”
4. Get in Touch with Website Owners
Send an introductory email to them that mentions that you’re interested in contributing as a guest author and want to serve their readers. You can go through their guest post guidelines or the contact page to get their contact details. To give website owners an idea of your work quality, you can provide some links to your recently published blogs on other websites.
You can also pitch some blog topics that you think their readers will get value from.
To make your email look more professional, don’t forget to add your name, email id, digital signature, and links to your official social media pages in your email footer.
5. Create a Quality Guest Post
At this point, you have a list of websites that receive guest posts. Now it’s time to create a quality guest post. Don’t just write to gain a backlink; your content must provide valuable knowledge to the audience. Your post must be engaging and meaningful to the website’s readers you’re writing for.
Also, try to imitate the writing style of website author to increase your chances of getting the post approved. Don’t forget to optimize your post for search engines as well. Try to write a great SEO title to get a good ranking in search engine results.
Don’t be upset if your post gets rejected; you can always submit it to other websites or publish it on your own website.
Send your guest post through email in Microsoft word format or as per the author’s requirement.
Check out some quick tips to write quality guest posts below:
- Follow all the mentioned guidelines
- Write a catchy headline and content. Try running it through a headline analyzer.
- Add visuals to make your post more engaging.
- Optimize it for search engines.
- Get it to proofread by an editor.
6. Write a Strong Bio
The majority of blog owners require a bio that is published at the end of your article. Always keep it sweet and short with a clear call to action. According to many experts, you should always write your bio in the third person. Not only it makes your bio sound more objective but also useful in a formal setting.
Some blog owners don’t accept links within the post, so this is also the place where you can add a link to your website.
7. Promote Your Guest Post
Once your guest post is approved and published, it’s time to track any improvement in your website traffic and subscribers. If you do not see any significant improvement, you may consider promoting it.
You can leverage social media platforms like Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, Twitter, MySpace, etc., to promote your guest post. Also, use relevant hashtags to give your post maximum exposure on social networks.
8. Reply to Comments
A lot of guest post contributors make the mistake of not replying to comments on your guest post. You must actively respond to readers’ comments to build a strong relationship with them. Try to respond to comments as soon as they roll in.
Remember, blog owners hate those contributors who just submit the post and run away. So be a responsible contributor.
At last, we would say, always try to provide useful content that is valuable for the audience.
So these were a few tips and tricks to get started with guest posting. Hopefully, you find them helpful. If you have any questions regarding guest posting, you can ask in the following comment section. We will try our best to answer them.
